Nevertheless this very ferocity was not only inevitable, but it was in a certain sense proper; or, at least, even if many of its manifestations were blamable, the spirit that lay behind them was right.  The backwoodsmen were no sentimentalists; they were grim, hard, matter-of-fact men, engaged all their lives long in an unending struggle with hostile forces, both human and natural; men who in this struggle had acquired many unamiable qualities, but who had learned likewise to appreciate at their full value the inestimable virtues of courage and common-sense.  The crisis demanded that they should be both strong and good; but, above all things, it demanded that they should be strong.  Weakness would have ruined them.  It was needful that justice should stand before mercy; and they could no longer have held their homes, had they not put down their foes, of every kind, with an iron hand.  They did not have many theories; but they were too genuinely liberty-loving not to keenly feel that their freedom was jeopardized as much by domestic disorder as by foreign aggression.

The tories were obnoxious under two heads:  they were the allies of a tyrant who lived beyond the sea, and they were the friends of anarchy at home.  They were felt by the frontiersmen to be criminals rather than ordinary foes.  They included in their ranks the mass of men who had been guilty of the two worst frontier crimes—­horse-stealing and murder; and their own feats were in the eyes of their neighbors in no way distinguishable from those of other horse-thieves and murderers.  Accordingly the backwoodsmen soon grew to regard toryism as merely another crime; and the courts sometimes executed equally summary justice on tory, desperado, and stock-thief, holding each as having forfeited his life.[4]

The backwoodsmen were engaged in a threefold contest.  In the first place, they were occasionally, but not often, opposed to the hired British and German soldiers of a foreign king.  Next, they were engaged in a fierce civil war with the tories of their own number.  Finally, they were pitted against the Indians, in the ceaseless border struggle of a rude, vigorous civilization to overcome an inevitably hostile savagery.  The regular British armies, marching to and fro in the course of their long campaigns on the seaboard, rarely went far enough back to threaten the frontiersmen; the latter had to do chiefly with tories led by British chiefs, and with Indians instigated by British agents.

Soon after the conflict with the revolted colonists became one of arms as well as one of opinions the British began to rouse the Indian tribes to take their part.  In the northwest they were at first unsuccessful; the memory of Lord Dunmore’s war was still fresh in the minds of the tribes beyond the Ohio, and they remained for the most part neutral.  The Shawnees continued even in 1776 to send in to the Americans white prisoners collected from among their outlying bands, in accordance with the terms of the treaty entered into on the Pickaway plains.[5]